Re:I'm impressed! (Score 2)

I really don't feel like pursuing this thread much further, but I will indulge you a bit.

This is the usual lazy statement of individuals who can't come up with a compelling argument but want to try and get in the last word anyways: "I have so many *better* things to do with my time than argue with you."

1) Tons of gun laws...no need for any more

You evidently haven't been paying attention to your own arguments, much less mine.

Your original claim was that "easy access to guns" is a contributing factor to school shootings. You sought to end debate there with the ad hominem that anyone who disagrees with your premise "isn't serious about tackling the problem."

Unfortunately, the premise is objectively and verifiably false. School shootings such as Paducah and Columbine are almost exclusively a phenomenon of the 1990s, but firearms were far more widely and freely available thirty years ago -- because they were orders of magnitude less regulated by all levels of government -- than they are today.

For example, in 1967 I could purchase a brand new select-fire (id est, fully-automatic) military-style rifle through mail order, with no waiting period or verification of my age, criminal history, or mental/emotional suitability to own such a weapon. Today, assuming ownership of such a weapon was not prohibited by the laws of my state (which, in my case, it is) and assuming I could even find such a weapon for sale, I could only effect a transfer through a federally-licensed firearms dealer after enduring a thorough background check and paying a hefty tax on top of the many thousands of dollars the gun would cost. I would have to continue paying this tax annually for as long as I owned the firearm. Moreover, the newest firearm I could possibly obtain would be over fifteen years old, and if the background check determined that I was ineligible to own a firearm, I would earn myself, at minimum, a five-year vacation in Club Fed.

If "easy access to guns" is indeed part of the problem, then you should have absolutely no trouble finding example after example of maladjusted 1960's teens using the rifles they brought to school and kept in coat closets or lockers for ROTC classes or rifle team practices shooting up their classmates. The fact that neither you nor other gun control advocates can do so simply underscores the false assumptions and faulty logic behind the "easy access to guns" argument.

2) Gun ownership promotes civility. Guns for everyone ! (law abiding, that is)

I have not made this argument. There is no basis for believing that gun ownership promotes civility any more than there is for believing that gun ownership causes crime. (Well. I take that back: there's slightly more. A study conducted from 1993-1995 by the USDOJ's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention concluded that children who get guns legally from their parents and are taught to use them responsibly are substantially less likely to commit crimes of any sort.) However, it is true that private ownership of firearms has a powerful deterrent effect on crime. This has been demonstrated in criminological research (see More Guns, Less Crime by John Lott, Jr.) and by polls of criminals (a study conducted in the early 1980s by UMass Amherst researchers James Wright and Peter Rossi), but if you're still not convinced, perhaps you'd be willing to erect a sign on your front lawn reading, "ATTENTION CRIMINALS: THIS IS A GUN-FREE HOME".

Federal gun legislation was passed several years ago that purported to ban the sale and possesion of assault weapons. The problem with the legislation was that rather than define the guns based on how they worked, the legislation was based on how the guns looked!

The reason for this is simple: there is no fundamental difference between those fearsome military-look "assault weapons" and ordinary civilian-look firearms except appearance. Long demonized by gun control advocates and the media, "assault weapons" are simply semi-automatic (id est, one shot per trigger pull) firearms that share the cosmetic characteristics of military weapons: pistol grips, bayonet lugs, flash supressors, thumbhole stocks, and so forth. None of these features have ever been shown to have any correlation to crime rates -- when was the last drive-by bayonetting you heard about? -- and an ordinary .30-06 bolt-action deer rifle is substantially more accurate and lethal than, say, an AR-15 (the civilian, semi-automatic version of the M-16A2).

But since you brought it up, let's pretend you're king for a day. First, propose a logically-consistent rationale that holds up to real-world scrutiny for outlawing the manufacture and sale of "assault weapons". ("They're scary-looking" is not adequate.) Second, define what an "assault weapon" is on the basis of operation rather than appearance, with the definition neither too broad (thereby including civilian-look firearms) nor too narrow (thereby excluding some "assault weapons"). Do both these things satisfactorily and you can have all the bans you want.

This was all done under the stewardship of the NRA and its lackeys on Capitol Hill. You see, they realized they could curry public favor by pointing to gun legislation that they passed and they also realized that they would rack up right-winger brownie points with their base by passing innocous legislation!

This is hilarious historical revisionism. The NRA and other gun rights groups fought tooth and nail against the Clinton administration's 1993 "assault weapons" ban, and have been lobbying for its repeal ever since. A major reason the Republicans now enjoy a slender majority in both houses of Congress is precisely because of gun owners' outrage at the Democrats passage of the legislation; a major reason the Republicans will likely lose their majority in both houses of Congress next election year is because they've pushed nearly as much gun control legislation as the Democrats, and renegged on their 1994 "Contract With America" promise to repeal the "assault weapons" ban. You really need to stop believing everything HCI tells you.

Gun manufacturers modified their gun designs so that their new guns would not look like the guns defined in legislation. This allowed them to continue to sell assault guns unbidened.

I'm not sure I understand your problem with this. The 1993 law bans the manufacture or sale of weapons that carry two or more of the offending features. How have gun manufactures violated either the spirit or the letter of the law by manufacturing and selling guns that only carry one of the offending features?

This same tactic was applied when state and local govt's attempted to outlaw the sale and possesion of "saturday night special" type guns that criminals were fond of using. Once again, the laws were based on how the guns looked. Some cities found that after the guns had been redesigned, 99% of the guns were deemed to look sufficiently different as to be sellable under the law.

Again, you're combining a thorough ignorance of the facts surrounding "Saturday Night Specials" (it might suprise you to learn that the term is a derivation of the racist phrase "Niggertown Saturday Night", used to describe usually-violent black neighborhoods in the 1960s) with historical revisionism on a grand scale.

Put simply, the criteria for what is and isn't a "Saturday Night Special" are a moving target. Everyone agrees that gun manufacturers should be held liable if the guns they produce harm someone as the result of a malfunction or defect. However, nobody can demonstrate that guns classified as "Saturday Night Specials" are used in crime to any greater percentage than they make up retail purchase (id est, "Saturday Night Specials" make up X percent of crime guns seized, but also X percent of legitimate retail purchases, so there's no disproportionate criminal use).

Furthermore, time and again throughout history, when artificial scarcities have been imposed on products with the intention of controlling bad behavior, bad guys have invariably managed to find workable substitutes, which leaves only the law-abiding consumers of the products adversely affected. Think of the Volstead Act.

Le's examine California's recent high-profile ban of "junk guns" (let's use that term, since it's interchangeable with "Saturday Night Specials", and does not have racist origins) to get an idea of what such laws actually accomplish. As of January 1 of next year, California bans the manufacture and sale of any semi-automatic handgun that lacks a positive manual safety and/or fails certain drop tests and other bureaucratically-imposed safety requirements. This outlaws many inexpensive handguns, most of which chamber small calibers of ammunition and have small magazines. The primary consumers of these guns are lower-income people -- the folks at the greatest risk of becoming victims of crime. Ergo, they'll be priced out of firearms market and largely unable to obtain guns for self-protection unless they turn to the black market and make themselves criminals. Meanwhile "real" criminals will merely find workable substitutes for the artificially-scarce products -- higher quality firearms that chamber larger (and therefore more deadly) calibers of ammunition and have larger magazines. Does this sound like an advantageous plan to you?

But it doesn't stop there: firearms made by Glock and SigSauer, some of the highest quality and most reliable handguns in the world, lack positive manual safeties, and so will be "junk guns".

Inexplicably, law enforcement is exempted from the law; if a Glock 22 isn't safe enough for me because it lacks a positive manual safety, why is it safe enough for it to be the standard-issue duty sidearm for the Santa Clara County Sherrif's Department?

You see my little misanthropic friend [sorry, I couldn't come up with anything cuter than snookems :>( ], your argument has a few holes in it. You can't judge the merit of a laws by numbers alone. If you want to be honest, what you need to do is actually examine what the law is really doing.

You're attempting to worm your way out of a losing argument by changing the subject, friend: you started with "easy access to guns contributes to school shootings"; I debunked that myth, and now you're railing against the idea that quantity of laws equals quality of laws -- an argument that I've never made. That's called a straw man.

It is not my view that, simply because we have N laws on the books, we therefore need no more laws. It is my view that virtually every form of gun control is irrational (read: doesn't make any real-world sense), counterproductive (read: does far more harm than good as a crime-reduction or crime-prevention measure), unprincipled (read: contrary to the fundamental principles of a free society), and unconstitutional (read: contrary to the plain language and historical context of the Second and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution). I would be happy to defend this position if you're interested, but let's do it through email.

Ok. Let's examine your second argument. You use the NRA staple argument that widespread gun ownership has the ancillary effect of lowering crime rates. The implication being that criminals are reluctant to operate in areas where they are uncertain whether their intended victims will be packing heat. The state of Texas is always used as an example.

This type of argument is what is known as sophistry. Upon face value it appears that your logic may actually make sense. However, the simplistic and deceptive nature of your argument is always disproven after careful analysis. To insinuate that the crime rate can ever be attributed to one single factor is sheer lunacy. But this is what you NRAphytes have been trained to do. If we were to suspend reality for a second and assume that you actually believed your own argument, we should then be able to extrapolate your argument to further prove its conclusiveness. Unfortunately, when we look around the world, we find very few cases to support your argument. Europe and Asia have very low rates of gun ownership, and yet they have remarkably low rates of violence and crime. Is there some phenomenom that makes America special? If so, I would appreciate it if you could explain it to me.

As before, you're knocking down a straw man of your own manufacture. At no point have I said that there is a causal relationship between rates of gun ownership and rates of violent crime, anyplace in the world. In fact, globally, there is virtually no relationship that can consistently be found between nations' crime rates and laxity of gun laws. Gun rights advocates often hold up Switzerland and Isreal as examples of countries with lax gun control and very little crime without mentioning that both countries have national firearms licensure, which is something we abhor. Meanwhile, gun control advocates often hold up Japan and the United Kingdom as examples of countries with tight gun control and very little crime without mentioning that the UK's crime rate has been steadily increasing since the imposition of a tough gun ban, and that the Japanese both have a suicide rate that eclipses American gun deaths of all kinds, and do not place the same emphasis on certain civil liberties central to the American ethos. Put simply, global differences in crime rates are more attributable to cultural differences between countries than they are differences in gun laws, as observed in The Samurai, The Mountie, and The Cowboy: Should America Adopt the Gun Controls of Other Democracies, an award-winning book by criminologist David Kopel.

I have noted, as other intelligent people have, the profound correlative relationship that manifests itself over and over again in the United States: here, in this country, private ownership of firearms and civilians' ability to carry concealed firearms appears to have a powerful deterrent effect to crime. Obviously there are other factors that can account for deltas in crime rates, but it is the business of criminologists to control for these factors to the satisfaction of peer review. Researchers such as John Lott and Gary Kleck have done this. They have won awards from their professional organizations and acclaim from their peers and critics alike. Their findings vindicate civilian ownership of firearms and liberalized concealed carry in this country, and offer a compelling argument that in the cost-benefit analysis over firearms, even using estimates most advantageous to gun control advocates, the benefits are greater than the costs. I invite you to look up their research -- it's all over the web -- and inform yourself. You might be surprised at how your views change after you actually learn about the issue.

I could go on for hours but I'm actually bored with you now so I'm going to call it quits. I do want to thank you for the laugh though, as does my girl!

I'm happy I could be a source of amusement. I apologize for calling you a moron initially; it's become apparent that your problem isn't congenital stupidity, but rather simple (and hopefully curable) ignorance.

Have fun cleaning your guns tonight!

Cheers.